How does a Hackintosh netbook compare to the iBook?

The MSI Wind continues to top out the charts as the most Macintoshable netbook around, but what's real life performance like, non-anecdotally?
The guys at Apple Different did some good old fashion benchmarks, and discovered that an Atom N270 at 1.66Ghz and 1GB of RAM churned and cogitated Leopard better than a late 2004 iBook with a Power PC 1.33 GHz processor and 768MB of RAM, with a boot up time of around 48 seconds to the iBook's agonizing minute.
That's not exactly what most of us would call lickety split, and if you don't care about boot up, the Atom fares even worse, unzipping files and converting albums slower than the iBook.
It's food for thought. An MSI Wind continues to be appealing for being an almost out-of-the-box Mac hackable netbook, but I'm not sure I could stomach those performance sacrifices when I could just run XP or something like Ubuntu Netbook Remix.
Leo in the Sky With Diamonds [Apple Different]

14 Responses to How does a Hackintosh netbook compare to the iBook?

“I’d rather see a mac lappie compared to a Dell DL620 (or to the ultra-expensive ultra-lightweight Panasonic toughbook, or the VAIO VGN-TX670P) running Ubuntu LTS, personally. Seems more likely to help in purchase decisions.”

But we’re talking about how Leopard runs on netbooks, here, not a laptop / OS showdown.

That’s pretty interesting actually. I’ve always liked the iBook series, the whole range was a nice change from “this is what you use for business” laptop – pretty groundbreaking at the time. The discrete graphics card etc are all nice touches too.

I think the issue of depreciation is worth having a look at too – although the iBook ORIGINALLY went on sale for three to four times what a netbook costs right now, actually, when you buy a used one it’s suddenly scraping Â£100 making the iBook three to four times cheaper than a new netbook. Complete turnaround.

It’s 4 years old now but it’s still holding its own against modern competition? Sounds pretty impressive actually. Clearly it’s blown out of the water by a full laptop that costs $1200 now but it’s apparently fine compared to the Atom.

And remember: What’s greener than buying a new computer? Recycling an old one.

I have a 1.2 GHz iBook, and I’m just putting the finishing touches on a black MSI Wind, 1.5 GB RAM, and running 10.5.6. I wouldn’t even compare the two, as the Atom is MUCH faster than any G4 computer I’ve ever used to run Leopard. I’m still not sure how useful the Wind is going to be for me at this point, but it’s getting better every day with fewer unsupported bits remaining.

I’d be much more interested in benching the Wind against a 1.6 Ghz MacBook Air.

@#7 Boot time != wake from sleep time. The Wind is also instant on from sleep because it supports sleep under OS X really well. I’ve only had it a couple weeks, but it hasn’t crashed once. The screen is 10″ and 1024×600. You’re not losing that many pixels compared to the iBook. The main annoyances so far are the very small track pad (pretty much all netbooks have that), and extremely minute clicker, which can be hard to find. Battery life for the 6-cell unit is between 4-5 hours, so its up there. The new EEE 1000 is supposed to have a 9.5 hr battery life. Real life maybe 6.5? that’s not bad.

Thanks for the benchmark test! I have been thinking about selling my 14″ 1.42GHZ iBook (the last iBook Apple made)for a netbook. The iBook is so heavy making it a pain for portability. Has anyone run iMove on a netbook? Just curious as to how it performed? Thanks!

Um, aren’t they comparing a 2004 computer with a 2007 computer and expressing surprise at the results?

I’d rather see a mac lappie compared to a Dell DL620 (or to the ultra-expensive ultra-lightweight Panasonic toughbook, or the VAIO VGN-TX670P) running Ubuntu LTS, personally. Seems more likely to help in purchase decisions.

Oddly enough, some of the charts in the full article bring in a first-gen Macbook Air – which trounces everything except the newer Dell laptop with a faster CPU.

The real upshot of this article is that “this netbook pretty much exactly matches the performance of this five-year-old iBook”. Disc read is faster (not surprising, especially if the netbooks have SSDs) but everything else is about the same.